Embodiments of the invention are directed to techniques for managing information assets in an enterprise environment. More specifically, embodiments of the invention provide an information asset management tool configured to capture and utilize crowd wisdom in order to identify and share relationships about information assets within the enterprise.
Organizations commonly have to manage very large-scale information systems, which can include a very large number of both interrelated and independent information assets. While information assets can vary in nature, examples include structured systems such as traditional relational databases as well as unstructured systems such as content repositories and document stores. The degree of formality with which these systems are monitored, registered and managed can vary extensively within a large enterprise. An enterprise typically manages mission-critical information systems. However, such systems are frequently outnumbered by unmanaged systems (e.g., spreadsheets, local database and document stores, as well as other information assets). More generally, it is not unusual for a large enterprise to manage thousands of distinct information repositories along with a (sometimes unknown) number of ad-hoc data stores and local working environments, which can themselves also number in the thousands. As noted, the information assets of a given enterprise are frequently not independent of one another. For example, one information asset may store data extracts from another information asset. Similarly, information assets can share processing states during data integration (or during extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes), or provide related information repositories which store equivalent information segmented by line of business, and so on. Accordingly, in many cases, understanding the relationships between assets may be as important as understanding the assets themselves.